[PATCH] mm/memory_hotplug.c: don't fail hot unplug quite so eagerly

[John Hubbard]

mm/memory_hotplug.c: don't fail hot unplug quite so eagerly

Some device drivers add memory to the system via memory hotplug. When
the driver is unloaded, that memory is hot-unplugged.

However, memory hot unplug can fail. And these days, it fails a little
too easily, with respect to the above case. Specifically, if a signal is
pending on the process, hot unplug fails. This leads directly to: the
user must reboot the machine in order to unload the driver, and
therefore the device is unusable until the machine is rebooted.

During teardown paths in the kernel, a higher tolerance for failures or
imperfections is often best. That is, it is often better to continue
with the teardown, than to error out too early.

So in this case, other things (unmovable pages, un-splittable huge
pages) can also cause the above problem. However, those are demonstrably
less common than simply having a pending signal. I've got bug reports
from users who can trivially reproduce this by killing their process
with a "kill -9", for example.

Fix this by soldering on with memory hot plug, even in the presence of
pending signals.

Signed-off-by: John Hubbard <jhubbard@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
 mm/memory_hotplug.c | 6 ------
 1 file changed, 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/memory_hotplug.c b/mm/memory_hotplug.c
index 8e0fa209d533..57a46620a667 100644
--- a/mm/memory_hotplug.c
+++ b/mm/memory_hotplug.c
@@ -1879,12 +1879,6 @@ int __ref offline_pages(unsigned long start_pfn, unsigned long nr_pages,
 	do {
 		pfn = start_pfn;
 		do {
-			if (signal_pending(current)) {
-				ret = -EINTR;
-				reason = "signal backoff";
-				goto failed_removal_isolated;
-			}
-
 			cond_resched();
 
 			ret = scan_movable_pages(pfn, end_pfn, &pfn);
-- 
2.41.0